For what it's worth, following the above instructions (even mine) didn't work. (Yes, I'm currently suffering from the same problem.) I think I got a small piece of spyware hiding out somewhere, but I haven't really had the desire to try to really fix it, as I regularly use Opera as my browser.
Quick fix:
www.mozilla.org It's a heck of a lot more stable and not vulnerable to the countless bugs Microsoft is notorious for.